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their collections of Whiteman, Hilton, Ellington, and others. 57
The official attitude towards foreign science and the global scientific community evolved in a similar manner in the pre-war years. During the 1920s and early 1930s the Soviet leadership invested a great deal of effort acquiring equipment and expertise from Europe and the US: Fordism and Taylorism were watchwords for excellence. 58 The 15th Party Congress in 1928 called for the ‘widest use of West European and American scientific and scientific-industrial experience’ and between 1928 and 1932 over 3000 foreign engineers worked on high profile projects in the USSR, such as the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, Dnepr Dam, and the Nizhny Novgorod car factory. 59
     
     
53 See, for example, Iu. Dmitriev’s introduction to Leonid Utesov’s 1959 autobiog- raphy , Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva , henceforth RGALI
f. R3005, op. 1, d. 82, ll. 17–25. For a discussion of Soviet jazz in the pre-war era, see
E. D. Uvarova, ed., Russkaia sovetskaia Estrada 1930–1945: Ocherki istorii (Moscow, 1977), 271–6.
54 Uvarova, Russkaia sovetskaia Estrada , pp. 276–8; RGALI f. R3005, op. 1, d. 82, l.
187.
55 Ball, Imagining America, 102.
56 F. Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917–1980 (Oxford, 1983), 107–25; Uvarova, Russkaia sovetskaia Estrada, 290–301.
57 Starr, Red and Hot, 111–14.
58 J. Brooks, ‘The Press and its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 30s’, in
S. Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowitch, and R. Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, 1991), 239–40; Ball, Imagining America, 24–5.
59 D. Holloway , Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy
1939–1956 (New Haven, 1994), 15; Rogger, ‘How the Soviets See Us’, 124.
Introduction xxxi
However, Soviet imports of foreign technology and expertise were sharply curtailed after 1932. The 17th Party Congress in 1934 declared that domestic, rather than foreign, technology would make the USSR the most advanced nation in Europe, and the official press began to trumpet the achievements of Soviet science and technology. 60 As the Moscow Daily News announced in 1935, ‘If foreign was always a synonym for the best in Russia, the situation has changed radically now. The Soviet Union has a powerful industry which is able to produce any machine, any metal or any chemical.’ 61 The USSR had drawn whatever it might need from the West and would now forge ahead on a mixture of reverse engineered copies and domestically designed materials. Scientific links with the outside world were sharply curtailed. Having good connections inside the All Union Society for Cultural Connections (VOKS) had been an essential means of obtain- ing materials from abroad in the 1920s—by the 1930s it was a political liability. 62 Domestic achievements in aeronautics and Arctic exploration were touted as symbols of the strength of Soviet civilization. Heroic narratives such as the Cheliuskin Expedition, to rescue a group of sailors stranded on a polar ice flow, were celebrated from the capital cities to the GULAG. 63 As Avins argues, the key message of Kataev’s Time Forward , one of the most popular novels of the decade, was that, ‘Russia is figuratively becoming its own “West”—developing the industrial capacity and national image that will enable it to surpass the West of modern capitalism.’ 64 These ideas about Western civilization, in com- bination with official narratives about international diplomacy defined what it meant to be Soviet in relation to the outside world before 1939. This book offers a distinctive approach to the second key question within the post-1991 historiography of the USSR: how did ordinary people engage with Soviet power in Stalin’s later years? It seeks to build on and clarify some of the ambiguities within Kotkin’s work on 1930s’ Magnitogorsk. Kotkin’s concept of ‘speaking